=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1991/paper-01
|storemode=property
|title=Soft Skills of Developers in Software Engineering: View from the PhD Students' Side
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1991/paper-01.pdf
|volume=Vol-1991
|authors=Sergei Voitenko,Lyudmila Gadasina
}}
==Soft Skills of Developers in Software Engineering: View from the PhD Students' Side==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1991/paper-01.pdf
Soft Skills of Developers in Software
Engineering: View from the PhD Students’ Side?
Sergey S. Voitenko and Lyudmila V. Gadasina
Saint Petersburg State University, Russia
{s.voitenko,l.gadasina}@spbu.ru
Abstract. The paper presents the results of a survey of opinions Soft-
ware Engineering (SWE) PhD-students enrolled in the international pro-
gram at the Erasmus+ PWs@PhD Project of eleven universities from five
European countries, Russia and Jordan. The main intent of the research
is to learn more about the ways in which PhD-students in the SWE field
can prepare themselves for careers in modern exacting and fast changing
job market. First results of the investigation allowed for PhD-students
themselves to identify groups of the most signicant for them professional
skills, to find out the level of mastering these skills and to evaluate inten-
tion to obtain them. Processing and analysis results of the new survey
and comparison the lists of soft skills ranked by students with list of
21st century skills and lists of skills required by employers allowed to
give nontrivial recommendation for universities administrations, those
who strive to democratize the intellectual labor and to help economic
development at the same time.
Keywords: soft skills · software engineering · PhD training · survey
1 Concept of Software Engineering
Software Engineering (SWE) is a relatively new area of activity. The origins of
the term ’software development’ refer to different sources. Officially it was first
used in 1968 as the title of the World Conference on Software Development,
supported by NATO. The conference was attended by international experts on
software who agreed on defining prime practices for software grounded in the
application of engineering. The result of the conference is a report1 that defines
how software should be developed.
Modern, generally accepted best-practices for Software Engineering have
been collected by the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7 subcommittee and published as the
Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK, ISO/IEC TR 19759:2005.
Retrieved 2012-04-01).2
?
The research is partially supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research
(RFBR), grant 16-06-00221.
1
http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PDF
2
https://www.iso.org/standard/33897.html
2 Sergey S. Voitenko and Lyudmila V. Gadasina
Recall here the classical definitions: “SWE is the application of engineering to
the development of software in a systematic method” [1]. “SWE is the application
of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation,
and maintenance of software” [8]. According to the survey3 only about 40 percent
of software developers have degrees in computer science, and almost no degrees in
SWE. So, it would not be surprising that people are confused about the difference
between Software Engineering and Computer Science. The principal distinction
between science and engineering in software is the same as the distinction in
other fields. Following [15], [17] we remind significant differences.
Scientists learn what is true, how to test hypotheses, and how to extend
knowledge in their field. Engineers learn what is true, what is useful, and how
to apply well-understood knowledge to solve practical problems. Those who are
doing science can afford to be narrow and specialized, and those who are do-
ing engineering need a broad understanding of all the factors that affect the
designing product. And what is more important for Employers and Professors,
an undergraduate science education prepares students to continue their studies
while an undergraduate engineering education prepares students to enter the
workforce immediately after completing their studies.
In other words, classical Computer Science is helpful to Software Engineering,
but will never be enough. Good Software Engineering also includes creativity, vi-
sion, multi-disciplinary thinking, and humanity. This observation frees Software
Engineering researchers to spend time on building up a body of collected wisdom
for future practitioners. Professors should not try to make Software Engineering
into an extension of mathematically-based Computer Science [5].
From the other side, requirements of employers from the Computer Scientist
are waiting for ability to solve important, but highly applied, narrowly focused
tasks, and from the Software Engineer – a creative approach, universal knowledge
and soft skills. Employers expect university programs to create fully developed
experts who have the ability to be leaders in their fields and are capable of
creating real-world values from their knowledge. At the same time professors
and academics more than two decades are trying to reduce the gap between
the skills that contemporary employers expect, and the actual skills that many
traditional educational programs continue to equip graduate and PhD students
[11], [14], [16], [20], [22], [23], [26].
2 Education for Software Engineer in Russia
System and level of training of Software Engineers varies in different universities
and has a significant impact on demand for graduates on the employment market.
In the Russian higher school, the Federal state educational standards for the
training of Bachelors and Masters in SWE were developed and approved by the
RF Ministry of Education and Science only in 2011. This allowed starting the
training of Bachelors and Masters in SWE in 91 universities of Russia. Saint
3
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017
Soft Skills of Developers in SWE: View from the PhD Students’ Side 3
Petersburg State University (SPbSU) by the Federal Law has right to develop
their own sets of educational standards, determine the structure and content
of educational programs at their own direction at all levels of higher education.
SPbSU own educational standard4 is set up for each direction of SWE training –
Bachelor, Specialist, and Master (the last one in academic, academically-oriented
and practice-oriented forms). Nevertheless, the educational standard at the level
of training of highly qualified personnel in SWE – PhD-doctorate – in the SPbSU
is currently missing.
Therefore, University uses various forms of international cooperation for the
preparation of highly qualified specialists, such as the Agreement for Double
Doctoral Degree between Lappeenranta University of Technology and Saint Pe-
tersburg State University signed in 2016 (including SWE specialties). Moreover,
international cooperation in the field of higher qualification scientific person-
nel training is supported by the PWs@PhD Project [18] in the European Union
Erasmus+ Program Capacity Building in Higher Education. This activity aims
for the inclusion of the new specialty Software Engineering in the RF Nomen-
clature of Specialty of Scientific Workers, that will allow Russian universities to
organize the preparation of postgraduate and doctoral students, as well as carry
out the defense of candidate and doctoral dissertations. And in the perspective
of introducing in Russia, following the Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, the PhD
degree as the third level of the Bologna system, it will also provide opportunities
for opening a PhD-students training and for defending PhD theses in the field
of SWE [9], [25].
3 Education for Software Engineer – World trends
A classic example of a worldwide Software Engineering Center Silicon Val-
ley formed around a traditional learning institution, Stanford University. That
school has changed with the times, integrating with the tech business it has
helped spawn. Nowadays software industry is known for its indifference to for-
mal qualifications – few companies ask about a job applicant’s education, but
all will test specialized knowledge and teamwork qualities.
Recently Stack Overflow, a question and answer site for programmers, re-
leased the results of their 2017 annual survey5 of more than 64000 developers.
Among current professional developers globally, 76,5% of respondents said they
had a Bachelor’s degree or higher, such as a Master’s degree or equivalent, and
only 2,2% had a Doctoral degree. More than half (54,2%) of professional devel-
opers who had studied at a college or university said they had concentrated their
studies on computer science or software engineering. On the question ’What kind
of learning do you recommend?’ more developers (64,5%) answered ’should take
an online course than any other method’ followed by ’getting a book and working
through the exercises’ (50,2%).
4
http://spbu.ru/structure/documents/mm19xm7g.html
5
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017
4 Sergey S. Voitenko and Lyudmila V. Gadasina
This approach gave birth to a new educational model, the extreme manifes-
tation of which is the École 42, which does not have any professors, does not
issue any diploma or degree, and is open 24/7. According to official site6 , École
42 is a high quality, computer-programming training program, which provides
its curriculum completely free-of-charge to its students. The training is inspired
by new modern ways to teaching which include inverted class technology, peer-
to-peer pedagogy and project-based learning. The basic idea of École 42 is to
place all the students into a single building in the heart of Paris, give them Macs
with big Cinema displays, and provide them increasingly difficult programming
challenges. The students are given a very little direction about how to solve the
problems, so they have to turn to each other and to the super-fast Internet to
figure out the solutions [2]. École 42 activity is a good example of the fact that
programming is mainly a skill of solving problems that should be trained, rather
than a set of knowledge in Computer Science. This idea is a key to understanding
on how to learn programming. Of course, École 42 will not destroy traditional
universities, but certainly can accelerate the growth in the number of people
who do not believe in the need to obtain a university degree.
Online SWE education become increasingly popular among learners, therefor
classical universities have long begun to investigate the quality of such kind
learning [19]. Nevertheless, their quality has not been sufficiently studied. As for
recent results, in the interesting article [13] authors first time provide an overview
of flipped classroom studies through the analytical lens of de Bono’s ’Six thinking
hats’ model [3]. In another review article [10] authors sampled 30 popular and
diverse online coding tutorials, and analyzed what and how they taught learners.
It was found that tutorials largely taught similar content, organized content
bottom-up, and provided goal-directed practices with immediate feedback, but
few were tailored to learners’ prior coding knowledge and only a few informed
learners how to transfer and apply learned knowledge.
The same basic question is at the foundation of rapidly growing world’s soft-
ware ecosystem: employers want to hire and retain great engineers, universities
want to train great engineers, and young engineers want to become great. But
understanding of what characteristics define software engineering expertise still
lacks specificity, breadth, and rigor, in many respects because it is a new area
of knowledge and new industry. We can mention that as one of the main factors
to explain the situation. The authors of the article [12] believe that Software
Engineering expertise is much more about personality, interpersonal skills, and
decision-making expertise than about technical knowledge and ability, against
the background of incomplete, indirect, and abstract knowledge about Software
Engineering expertise in general. We, however, believe that strong technical com-
petence is the necessary base for the great Software Engineers. Nevertheless, in
the work [12] among all possible attributes authors identified the set that prac-
tice expert software engineers viewed as important for the engineering of software
and provided a contextualized understanding of why these attributes are impor-
6
https://www.42.us.org
Soft Skills of Developers in SWE: View from the PhD Students’ Side 5
tant in real-world practice. Their analysis identified a diverse set of 53 attributes
of great software engineers, at a high level they are:
(A) Personal Characteristics – Improving, Passionate, Open-minded;
(B) Decision Making – Knowledgeable about People and the Organization,
Sees the Forest and the Trees, Update Mental Models, Handling Complexity;
(C) Engagement with Teammates – Creating Shared Context, Creating Shared
Success, Creating a Safe Haven, Honest;
(D) Software Product – Elegant, Creative, Anticipating Needs.
In January, 2016, by surveying the chief HR officers at some of the world’s
leading companies, the World Economic Forum has released The Future of Jobs
[27] report revealing the top 10 skills person shall need by 2020. Report highlights
the changing nature of work, which became more trans-disciplinary, increasingly
collaborative and focused on solving complex problems in creative ways.
Table 1. Comparing lists of skills for 2020 and 2015
Place in List Skills Place in List
for 2020 for 2015
1 Complex Problem Solving 1
2 Critical Thinking 4
3 Creativity 10
4 People Management 3
5 Coordinating with Others 2
6 Emotional Intelligence (new) Quality Control (old 6)
7 Judgment and Decision Making 8
8 Service Orientation 7
9 Negotiation 5
10 Cognitive Flexibility (new) Active Listening (old 9)
Key skills for 2020 emerging to Job Family for Software Developers and An-
alysts are Complex Problem Solving, Critical Thinking, Cognitive Flexibility, Ac-
tive Learning and Mathematical Reasoning. The last one is absolutely necessary
skill at all time, we believe.
With many studies like mentioned above we following the authors come to
understanding Software Engineering not just as a purely technical discipline,
but a sociotechnical one, with individual contributors and their collaborations
supporting software developing. As a consequence, we come to the need to learn
Software Engineers soft skills as personal qualities that enable them to interact
effectively and harmoniously.
But very few investigators interested in the views of the SWE students them-
selves about the skills they need to future work, and almost none asked opinions
of SWE PhD-level students. That is why in this work we choose the group of
31 high level PhD students who are currently engaged in the modern prepa-
ration process at the PWs@PhD Project [18] and focused on the study of the
6 Sergey S. Voitenko and Lyudmila V. Gadasina
importance of exclusively soft skills for software developers. To this end, we have
chosen the so-called XXI Century Skills as a universal list of soft skills.
In general, we understand and emphasize it here – although soft skills are
important, they are still secondary, while technical skills are primary and neces-
sary. The main aim of the software developer is to write and maintain code (or
even only maintain in some cases), without these skills other does not have a big
value. As if the carpenter did not know how to work with hammer and plane,
but would have good communicative skills.
4 Education for Software Engineer – PhD Level
Doctoral education generates new knowledge by closely linking specialized educa-
tion and hands-on research experience. The results are important for the society
as a whole and for country competitiveness in a global knowledge-based econ-
omy. Doctoral education prepares a new generation of researchers in academia,
industry, government, and nonprofits, as well as a highly skilled workforce for
other sectors of the economy. Decades-long participation of large and growing
numbers of temporary visa holders in US attests to the attractiveness of this
model. United States and Japan have long-standing private higher education
sectors, and Western Europe has an almost completely public higher education
sector. Eastern and Central Europe and several African countries have recently
seen growth in private higher education.
According to the report of US National Science Foundation ’Science and
Engineering Indicators 2016’ the number of S&E doctorates conferred annually
by U.S. universities increased steadily between 2002 and 2008, declined through
2010, and increased by 14% through 2013, to nearly 39000. The growth in the
number of S&E doctorates between 2000 and 2013 occurred among U.S. citizens
and permanent residents as well as temporary visa holders. The largest increases
in S&E doctorates were in engineering and the biological sciences. Graduate
enrollment in computer sciences grew rapidly in the early 2000s, then decreased
through 2006, but it has generally increased since then.
The time required to earn a doctoral degree (as measured by time from
graduate school entry to doctorate receipt) and the success rates of those entering
doctoral programs are concerns for those pursuing a degree, the universities
awarding the degree, and the agencies and organizations funding doctoral study.
Longer times to degree mean lost earnings and a higher risk of attrition. Time to
degree increased through the mid-1990s but has since decreased in all S&E fields
from 7,7 to 6,9 years. The physical sciences and mathematics had the shortest
time to degree, whereas the social sciences and medical and other health sciences
had the longest. Time to degree was shortest at research universities with very
high research activity (6,7 years in 2013, down from 7,2 years in 1998) and it
was longer at universities that were less strongly oriented toward research.
The aim of this research is to explore the degree to which students realize
that international doctoral programs are providing them skills that will be on
demand on the current job market.
Soft Skills of Developers in SWE: View from the PhD Students’ Side 7
At the first stage of the study [6] a written survey was conducted of a group of
PhD students of eleven universities currently involved in the doctoral programs
in SWE at the international PWs@PhD Project [18]. Processing and statistical
analysis of the survey results allowed identify groups of the most significant
professional skills for student’s future work, to find out the PhD-students level
of knowledge and mastering these skills and to evaluate the student’s intention
to obtain them.
Particularly, we compare the list of skills ranked by students with a list of
skills required by employers in the areas close to the SWE. According to the re-
port [4], strategy and project management skills Research, Project management,
Negotiation and Analytic are in particular demand among high-skill, high paying
jobs in such fields like management and research. These jobs have experienced
wage growth and expanded employment opportunities in recent years. Devel-
oping the skills in this cluster can be particularly advantageous to job seekers
looking to advance their careers and take on additional responsibilities.
The skills of this cluster have the highest scores in student’s evaluation of
desired skills: Managing Project, Data Analysis, Research Methods and Nego-
tiation. In general, the correlation between the ranked sets of skills required
by employers and compiled by students in the area of Research, Planning and
Analysis is 0,41. These results show that, despite the fact that the complete lists
of skills required by employers and desired by students differ considerably, stu-
dents can see quite well the basic skills necessary to engage in higher positions
corresponding to their level of qualification.
In the present study, we selected the XXI Century skills as basic soft skills and
explored the importance of owning them for students undergoing preparation for
the PhD-thesis on SWE. Just a decade ago three large software and hardware
companies Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel set up a project XXI Century Skills to
develop a new educational system because they were concerned that universities
were not producing graduates that could fit best into the digital work places and
the new manufacturing system. In five years, researchers of education from all
over the world define what was meant by XXI century skills, such as a complex
skill collaborative problem solving [24]. The XXI century skills framework has
captured imagination of teachers and politicians around the world. It postulates
that the share of manual and routine cognitive labor is declining, and the share
of non-routine cognitive labor increases. Therefore, the society must reform ed-
ucation to provide students with skills more appropriate in the new economy.
Right now, the project is already at the stage of being able to define a template
that allows those sets of skills to work.
There are 4 groups of XXI Century skills7 :
(I) Ways of Thinking – Creativity & Innovation, Critical Thinking, Problem
Solving, Decision Making, Learning to Learn, MetaCognition;
(II) Ways of Working – Communication, Collaboration, Teamwork;
7
Partnership for the twenty-first century skills, http://www.p21.org, Assessment and
Teaching of twenty-first century skills (ATC21S), http://atc21s.org
8 Sergey S. Voitenko and Lyudmila V. Gadasina
(III) Tools for Working – Media Literacy, Information Literacy, ICT (Infor-
mation and Communication Technology) Literacy;
(IV) Ways of Living in the World – Citizenship Local & Global, Life & Carrier,
Personal & Social Responsibility, Cultural Awareness & Competence.
Developing the skills in this cluster can be particularly advantageous to job
seekers looking to advance their careers and take on additional responsibilities.
Analysis of the quantitative survey results using R application package con-
sist not only of standard comparing the mean scores, standard deviations and
correlation of the responses, but also the cluster analysis of the responses using
the method of Ward with manhattan distances between objects and other data
mining techniques. Statistical significance of differences when comparing the re-
sponses of various groups of respondents performed using the Mann-Whitney
U-test and variance analysis methods.
The same international group of 31 doctoral students who received training
in the PWs@PhD Project [18] were asked 12 general and two key questions. Of
the answers to general questions, the following two about the university role in
career preparation are of interest.
Table 2. The university role in career preparation
Questions Mean values Mean values for
for Russia other countries
How have you been informed before entering
the university about career prospects after graduation 2,80 3,29
in the chosen field of activity?
To what extent do educational university
program prepare you for a successful career after 3,40 3,79
graduation in the chosen field of activity?
The table 2 shows that Russia stands out at first glance. The average level
of ideas about the future career in Russia is lower than in the average for other
countries by 18% before and 12% after the university. In Russia, it increases
during the time of study at the university by 21%, and in other countries only
by 15%. However, according to the Mann-Whitney criterion, the difference in
answers to both questions for Russia and other countries is not statistically
significant (and it is also not significant in terms of age and sex).
For each of the groups (I)-(IV) of the XXI Century skills the respondents
answered two main questions:
1) Please rate your overall level of mastery that you have achieved during
training at the university in the following skills;
2) Please rate how likely it is that you take part in training the skills below,
if it were available to you as part of your high school program of education.
The results of the answers to these questions were subjected to statistical
and cluster analysis.
Soft Skills of Developers in SWE: View from the PhD Students’ Side 9
Cluster analysis, carried out for each skills group, allowed to identify two well-
separated groups of respondents who answered the first and second questions:
– respondents, who rate their level of mastery in this group of skills as a
sufficiently high;
– respondents, who rate their level of mastery in this group of skills as a low;
– respondents, who are interested in mastering this group of skills;
– respondents, who are not interested in mastering this group of skills.
A more detailed analysis of these results is beyond the scope of this article.
On the next diagrams for every group of skills one can see the residual after
averages of the answers for the 1st question have been subtracted from the av-
erages of the answers for the 2nd question. In other words, difference between
’What skills I would like to train’ and ’What skills I really mastered in my Uni-
versity’.
First two groups of skills – Ways of Thinking (I) and Ways of Working
(II) compose Learning and Innovation skills. They separate students who are
prepared for increasingly complex life and work environments in today’s world
from those who are not prepared properly. In the first turn, effective scientists
and engineers must be able to exhibit a range of functional and critical thinking
skills.
The descriptions of the skills are given below according to the website of the
Partnership for the skills of the 21st century8 . They were incorporated into the
text of the questionnaire also at the request of the respondents.
Ways of Thinking (I) imply among other Effectively Reasoning, Criti-
cal and Systems Thinking, Judgement and Decision Making, Problem Solving,
Creativity, Innovations Implementing and MetaCognition.
Effectively Reasoning means following skills: use various types of reasoning
as appropriate to the situation; effectively analyze and evaluate evidence, argu-
ments, claims and beliefs; analyze and evaluate major alternative points of view;
synthesize and make connections between information and arguments; interpret
information and draw conclusions based on the best analysis; reflect critically
on learning experiences and processes.
Critical Thinking supposes using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths
and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems.
Systems Thinking is ability to analyze how parts of a whole interact with
each other to produce overall outcomes in complex systems.
Judgement and Decision Making mean considering the relative costs and
benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one.
Metacognition is awareness and understanding of one’s own thought pro-
cesses.
Problem Solving signifies skills to solve different kinds of non-familiar prob-
lems in both conventional and innovative ways and identify and ask significant
questions that clarify various points of view and lead to better solutions.
8
http://www.p21.org
10 Sergey S. Voitenko and Lyudmila V. Gadasina
Creativity supposes skills to Think Creatively (use a wide range of idea cre-
ation techniques; create new and worthwhile ideas; elaborate, refine, analyze
and evaluate their own ideas in order to improve and maximize creative efforts)
and skills to Work Creatively with Others (develop, implement and communi-
cate new ideas to others effectively; be open and responsive to new and diverse
perspectives; incorporate group input and feedback into the work; demonstrate
originality and inventiveness in work and understand the real world limits to
adopting new ideas; view failure as an opportunity to learn; understand that
creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclical process of small successes and
frequent mistakes).
Learning to learn is the ability to pursue and persist in learning, to organize
one’s own learning, including through effective management of time and infor-
mation, both individually and in groups. This skill includes awareness of one’s
learning process and needs, identifying available opportunities, and the ability
to overcome obstacles in order to learn successfully.
At last, Implement Innovations means to work on creative ideas to make a
tangible and useful contribution to the field in which the innovation will occur.
Fig. 1. Mean values of points for Ways of Thinking group
Analysis. Maximum value of residuals we can see for Implement Innovations
skills. With that even mentioning of the implement innovations are absent in the
list of skills elaborated by this group members themselves [6]. It means they do
not see innovations in pedagogical process at their universities, we can suppose
that attention to Implement Innovations skills are absent in University courses
at all. However, it does not mean that they are on big demand on the market
for SWE positions.
A high need for mastering Creativity and Decisions Making skills is expected.
The traditional educational process in the academic style pays little attention to
the development of these skills, which are obviously in demand among employers.
Soft Skills of Developers in SWE: View from the PhD Students’ Side 11
On the contrary, respondents believe that they learned quite well during their
studies at the university in their Learning to Learn, Critical Thinking and, to
a lesser extent, Problem Solving skills. This, apparently, is due to the fact that
for SWE specialty they can be more related to hard skills whose mastering is
somehow included in the curriculum (see Figure 1).
Ways of Working (II) imply skills to Communicate Clearly and to Collab-
orate with Others effectively.
That means specialists must be able articulate thoughts and ideas effectively
using oral, written and nonverbal communication skills in a variety of forms and
contexts; listen effectively to decipher meaning, including knowledge, values,
attitudes and intentions; use communication for a range of purposes (e.g. to in-
form, instruct, motivate and persuade); utilize multiple media and technologies,
and know how to judge their effectiveness a priori as well as assess their im-
pact; communicate effectively in diverse environments (including multi-lingual);
demonstrate ability to work effectively and respectfully with diverse teams; exer-
cise flexibility and willingness to be helpful in making necessary compromises to
accomplish a common goal; assume shared responsibility for collaborative work,
and value the individual contributions made by each team member.
Fig. 2. Mean values of points for Ways of Working group
Analysis. Certainly, ability articulate thoughts and ideas effectively is im-
portant in any case. We see from the answers, that Collaboration and especially
Teamwork have a weak presence in respondents training, in less degree it con-
cerns Communication skills. Again, traditional classical training programs at
universities do not contribute to the development of the skills of this group,
while PhD-students themselves feel the need for their development. This should
be noted, since these skills are in high demand (see Figure 2).
The next group Tools for Working (III) contain Information, Media and
ICT literacies.
Information Literacy suppose handle information efficiently in time and ef-
fectively in sources; evaluate information critically and competently; manage the
flow of information from a wide variety of sources; use information accurately
and creatively for the problem solving; apply a fundamental understanding of
the ethical/legal issues surrounding the access and use of information.
12 Sergey S. Voitenko and Lyudmila V. Gadasina
Media Literacy means ability to analyze media (understand how and why
media messages are constructed, and for what purposes; examine how individ-
uals interpret messages differently, how values and points of view are included
or excluded, and how media can influence beliefs and behaviors; apply a fun-
damental understanding of the ethical/legal issues surrounding the access and
use of media) and to create media products (understand and utilize the most
appropriate media creation tools, characteristics and conventions; understand
and effectively utilize the most appropriate expressions and interpretations in
diverse, multi-cultural environments).
Information, Communication and Technology (ITC) Literacy requires use
technology as a tool to research, organize, evaluate and communicate infor-
mation; use digital technologies, communication/networking tools and social
networks appropriately to access, manage, integrate, evaluate and create infor-
mation to successfully function in a knowledge economy; apply a fundamental
understanding of the ethical/legal issues surrounding the access and use of in-
formation technologies.
Fig. 3. Mean values of points for Tools for Working group
Analysis. Media Literacy usually is not present at university. Information
and ICT literacies are the important skills for SWE so they are learned more in
universities. That’s why the students consider them to be known enough and are
not interested in further learning. This make sense in case these subjects could
be learned and extended by a person himself (see Figure 3).
The group Ways of Living in the World (IV) directed to develop thinking
skills, content knowledge, and social and emotional competencies to navigate
complex life and work environments. It contains Flexibility and Adaptability,
Initiative and Self-Direction, Productivity and Accountability, Leadership and
Responsibility, Social and Cross-Cultural skills.
Flexibility supposed to incorporate feedback effectively; deal positively with
praise, setbacks and criticism; understand, negotiate and balance diverse views
and beliefs to reach workable solutions, particularly in multi-cultural environ-
ments.
Soft Skills of Developers in SWE: View from the PhD Students’ Side 13
Adaptability is understood as ability to adapt to varied roles, jobs responsi-
bilities, schedules and contexts together with proficiency to work effectively in a
climate of ambiguity and changing priorities.
The Initiative expects the ability to work independently – to monitor, define,
prioritize and complete tasks without direct oversight, and to manage goals and
time, i.e. to set goals with tangible and intangible success criteria; to balance
tactical and strategic goals; utilize time and manage workload efficiently.
Self-directed students are those who are able to go beyond basic mastery of
skills and/or curriculum to explore and expand ones own learning and oppor-
tunities to gain expertise; demonstrate initiative to advance skill levels towards
a professional level, demonstrate commitment to learning as a lifelong process;
reflect critically on past experiences in order to inform future progress.
Productivity and Accountability here consist of two skills – the first is to
Manage Projects, i.e. to set and meet goals, even in the face of obstacles and
competing pressures, and to prioritize, plan and manage work to achieve the
intended result. The second – to Produce Results, i.e. to demonstrate additional
attributes associated with producing high quality products including the abilities
to: work positively and ethically; manage time and projects effectively; multi-
task; participate actively, as well as be reliable and punctual; present oneself
professionally and with proper etiquette; collaborate and cooperate effectively
with teams; respect and appreciate team diversity; be accountable for results.
Leadership means here ability to guide and lead others, particularly, to use
interpersonal and problem-solving skills to influence and to guide others toward
a goal; leverage strengths of others to accomplish a common goal; inspire others
to reach their very best via example and selflessness; demonstrate integrity and
ethical behavior in using influence and power.
Responsibility is understood primarily as responsibility for others, which is
ability to act responsibly with the interests of the larger community in mind.
Social and Cross-cultural skills include the ability to Interact Effectively with
others, particularly, to know when it is appropriate to listen and when to speak,
and to conduct themselves in a respectable, professional manner. The second
significant group of skills is ability to Work Effectively in Diverse Teams with
respect cultural differences; to work effectively with people from a range of social
and cultural backgrounds; to respond open-mindedly to different ideas and val-
ues; to leverage social and cultural differences to create new ideas and increase
both innovation and quality of work.
Analysis. This and earlier surveys show that Leadership and Initiative skills
are in demand regardless of age, country, and university. Relevance of Social and
Cross-Cultural skills require introducing in universities collaborating projects
and programs of students from different faculties, universities, and countries.
Results also show that study programs in universities allow in big amount de-
velop such skills as Flexibility, Adaptability, Responsibility and Accountability.
Here it is appropriate to give a few comments from the side of experienced
software developers: Leadership can be a factor preventing getting an ordinary
job position on some job markets; Social and Cross-Cultural skills are not so
14 Sergey S. Voitenko and Lyudmila V. Gadasina
Fig. 4. Mean values of points for Ways of Living in the World group
hard to achieve in practice as most workers share common professional set of
skills; Self Direction for sure is one of the key skills, and Productivity is one of
the key skills for assessment by management (see Figure 4).
Mastery of 21st Century themes and core subjects (English, World languages,
Arts, Mathematics, Economics, Science, Geography, History, Government and
Civics) is essential for all students in the 21st century. In addition to these sub-
jects, schools must move to include promote understanding of academic content
at much higher levels by weaving 21st century Interdisciplinary Themes into
core subjects. They are:
Global Awareness. It is learning from and working collaboratively with indi-
viduals representing diverse cultures, religions and lifestyles in a spirit of mutual
respect and open dialogue in personal, work and community contexts; under-
standing other nations and cultures, including the use of non-English languages,
using 21st century skills to understand and address global issues.
Financial, Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy, that means at
least knowing how to make appropriate personal economic choices; understand-
ing the role of the economy in society; using entrepreneurial skills to enhance
workplace productivity and career options.
Civic Literacy, which signifies participating effectively in civic life through
knowing how to stay informed and understanding governmental processes; exer-
cising the rights and obligations of citizenship at local, state, national and global
levels; understanding the local and global implications of civic decisions.
Health Literacy. It contains obtaining, interpreting and understanding basic
health information and services and using such information and services in ways
that enhance health; understanding preventive physical and mental health mea-
sures, including proper diet, nutrition, exercise, risk avoidance and stress reduc-
tion; using available information to make appropriate health-related decisions;
establishing and monitoring personal and family health goals; understanding
national and international public health and safety issues.
Soft Skills of Developers in SWE: View from the PhD Students’ Side 15
Environmental Literacy. It requires to demonstrate knowledge and under-
standing of the environment and the circumstances and conditions affecting it,
particularly as relates to air, climate, land, food, energy, water and ecosystems;
demonstrate knowledge and understanding of society’s impact on the natural
world (e.g. population growth, population development, resource consumption
rate, etc.); investigate and analyze environmental issues, and make accurate con-
clusions about effective solutions; take individual and collective action towards
addressing environmental challenges (e.g. participating in global actions, design-
ing solutions that inspire action on environmental issues).
Fig. 5. Mean values of points for Interdisciplinary Themes group
Analysis. Skills of this group are of general view so the interest of the
respondents can be the sign not of the lack of it studying in the university but of
the importance of these skills in general. From the SWE professionals side Health
Literacy, Financial, Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy are very
important (see Figure 5).
The framework of 21st century skills looks blameless, in assumption that
in the future most adults are still hired employees. Nevertheless, this approach
does not justify itself in more distant future, when most people will not work
for wages. Their creative and productive impulses will be transmitted through
various new kinds of human practices, which can be summed up as Optional
Labor. The emergence of societies with low employment rates will create new
problems to education. In this direction education should move away from the
mastering skills to the developing of meaning and motivation to prepare students
for the world of optional labor. Following the work [21] we consider three kinds
of Optional Labor: Prosumption, Volunteerism and Self-Design.
Prosumption means Production and Consumption simultaneously. The author
of this new term argued that the separation of production from consumption
was a temporary aberration. It did not exist in pre-capitalist societies and will
not exist in the future economies. In the narrowest sense means creation content
within the Web 2.0 framework (Facebook, blogs, Wikipedia, twitter, Instagram).
16 Sergey S. Voitenko and Lyudmila V. Gadasina
Volunteerism. Volunteers are someone’s susceptible to the moral pressures,
moved by ethical considerations, and capable of empathy. At the same time, they
must be able to extract enough pleasure from their work to make it motivating.
They can do it through social contacts, or simply by engaging their minds and
creative impulses.
Self-Design is a whole new, larger meaning of a monumental art piece, created
out of one’s own entire life. The identity we produce is a life-long project, a
continuous memoir. Self-Design no more and no less than a new quest for the
meaning of life (e.g. Facebooking as a careful construction of the self-image and
a profoundly social activity).
Fig. 6. Mean values of points for Ways of Optional Labor group
Analysis. This group of skills is quite innovative for the modern universities.
Currently the universities do not have exact understanding of their development.
This may be the reason for the high relevance of this group among the respon-
dents (see Figure 6).
5 Conclusions and Recommendations
To develop a competitive software product Software Engineer must possess the
key hard skills – the ability to write and maintain code and necessary knowledge
of Computer Science and related technologies. But SWE is not just concerned
with the technical processes of software development and proficiency to create
simple and intuitive designs that another person (or themselves later) could
easily understand, but also with activities such as software project management
and with the development of tools, methods and theories to support software
production.
With results of our and many mentioned above studies we come to under-
standing that SWE undoubtedly is a sociotechnical discipline and undertak-
ing, with individual contributors and their collaborations supporting software
development. As a consequence, Software Engineers come to the need to pos-
sess soft skills as personal qualities that enable them to interact effectively and
Soft Skills of Developers in SWE: View from the PhD Students’ Side 17
harmoniously. Also, although the ability to learn new skills (i.e. continuous im-
provment) and to make decisions in increasingly more complex and ambiguous
situations on the high level in general is more important than any individual
technical skills, in some cases an employer may prefer a candidate with strong
experience in required specific area.
From the side of hard skills possessing, though, delivering the code only is
insufficient in conditions of complex contextual technical considerations, never-
theless delivering production quality code that considers error handling, memory
consumption, performance, security, and style, and is proper covered by unit tests
stays the main responsibility of a software developer.
In a more rigorous mathematical formulation, it can be argued that confident
possession of hard skills is a necessary condition for the successful work of a Soft-
ware Engineer, and the possession of developed soft skills is still only sufficient.
In other words, the presence of developed hard and soft skills is necessary and
sufficient for a good Software Engineer.
In a whole the above results of our current field study of the international
group of highly qualified in hard skills Software Engineers show that they un-
derstand the need to master soft skills too and are ready to learn them in their
universities.
Novice Software Engineers are often low proficient of how to become profes-
sionals. Present paper itemizes a set of skills that they might aim to achieve from
trainings, projects at work, mentoring, or self-regulation for enhancing person-
ality qualities and target areas for improvement.
It is well known that the adaptation of the Soft Engineer to the project is
critical, novices may also use these results to find the right fit with prospective
employers and teams, in terms of the skills they value as different teams empha-
size various skills differently. Mentioned above lists of skills may also help novices
better present themselves to employers. They might demonstrate to employers
that they possess or can develop those hard and soft skills which experienced en-
gineers and managers value. Also, that extends to highlighting substantial skills
when authoring resumes or presenting themselves in interviews.
The results of study also have significant value for curriculum choices, teach-
ing methods, and learning objectives in traditional SWE educational process.
First of all, university educators staff may consider adding courses on new
topics not found in their current curricula. For example, generally recognized
decision making to be a key part of Software Engineering, but this specific topic
is not a part of the ACM’s ’SE2004 Software Engineering Curriculum’ (retrieved
2012-03-25)9 . Meanwhile courses specifically about decision making or case stud-
ies of software engineering decisions might be helpful to SWE students and post-
graduates.
SWE educators might also use results of our and cited above investigations to
examine usually used teaching methods. Most key skills of Software Engineers
focus on how to do rather than what to do, such as communicative and cre-
ative skills, whereas most teaching instructions focus on teaching only cognitive
9
http://sites.computer.org/ccse/SE2004Volume.pdf
18 Sergey S. Voitenko and Lyudmila V. Gadasina
skills and acquire knowledge. In this direction educators might consider moving
their attention on the processes of how and in what ways Software Engineering
goals are attained. For example, existing Problem Based Learning approach and
Project Based Courses might use skills presented here to help students evaluate
each other’s behavior, as well as train communicative and creative soft skills
simultaneously with cognitive hard skills.
Finally, educators can consider explicitly discussing what things students will
not be capable to learn in academic settings, allowing them to be aware of poten-
tial skills and knowledge gaps and enable them to seek out opportunities outside
of the Universities where they might be better learned through mentorship on
the job, distance MOOCs, internships or open-source projects.
Surely this paper is only a start for better understanding of educational
problems in preparing of software engineers. There are many opportunities for
further work, such as examine of the combinations of key or dominant skills. Each
specific skill enumerated in this study could also be the subject of future studies
to provide deeper assessments of their impacts on SWE outcomes and provide
more insights into the unique qualities of the Software Engineering phenomenon.
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